Bliss, or Blackface Sentiment

When Senator Sunraider delivers the final speech of his career in Ralph Ellison's novel Juneteenth, he seems to articulate one of Ellison's most sincerely held beliefs. Urging his listeners not to "falter before our complexity," Senator Sunraider declares, "Ours is a youthful nation. . . . A marvel of purposeful political action, it was designed to solve those vast problems before which all other nations have been proved wanting. Born in diversity and fired by determination, our society was endowed with a flexibility designed to contain the most fractious contentions of an ambitious, individualistic and adventurous breed." ¹ As Sunraider continues, he urges his listeners, the other members of the Senate and all auditing visitors, including his assassin, to keep in mind "the outrages committed" by black Americans. We are meant to recognize this as a common rhetorical gesture for him. Indeed, Sunraider had made his career as a race-baiting politician. But the gesture quickly takes an odd yet quite Ellisonian turn. The leaders of the nation are to keep these outrages in mind because "perhaps therein lies a secret brightness, a clue. Perhaps the essence of their untamed and assertive willfulness, their crass and jazzy defiance of good taste and the harsh, immutable laws of economics, lies in their faith in the flexible soundness of the nation." For Sunraider, the flexible soundness of the nation is rooted in the ability of Americans to wear masks, "to forge a multiplicity of creative selves and styles" (Juneteenth, 23). Of course, Sunraider had benefited from the finest training the nation could provide in the skills necessary for the creation of these new selves. For Sunraider was born as Bliss, the literary inversion of Ellison's earlier character Bliss Proteus Rinehart and the paradoxical embodiment of the ambiguous possibilities that might be found in the practices and traditions of blackface.

Ellison's career stretched from the beginning to the end of the American Century—one might also say from the beginning to the end of "American Studies," but that is a different issue. By the time Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, wrote his 1941 editorial "The American Century," Ellison had been collecting black folklore for the Federal Writer's Project for three years and had written reviews and short articles for New Masses and other publications. In one of his earliest published pieces, "A Congress Jim Crow Didn't Attend," Ellison located "the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America's future" in the faces of those in attendance at the Third National Negro Congress. ² With the publication of Juneteenth in 1999, his efforts to articulate (in the fullest sense of the word) the best hopes of the nation and the cultural resourcefulness of black Americans saw their final statement. Ellison's firmly held hope was that the nation—the e pluribus unum that Sunraider tries to describe—would be conjured into existence when the special conditions that gave rise to African American culture were recognized as the generalized tragic conditions of existence and when the social and psychological inequalities that characterized those historical conditions were eliminated in the mutual recognition of a shared humanity and a national culture. Of course, Ellison was too good an artist to simply wish this mutual recognition into being. With the character of Bliss, he gave free reign to his blackface sentiment, to his longing for a national culture redeemed by black American folklore. And with the character of Senator Sunraider, Ellison illustrated the possessive investment in the mythology of whiteness that has historically prevented the materialization of this recognition. With his characteristic witty love of paradox, he made them the same person. ³

Bliss is born into the hands of Alonzo Hickman, an itinerant gambling, drinking, and hell-raising trombone player. Hickman had returned from the road to his home in Alabama because of a family tragedy. His brother had been lynched for the rape of a white woman, a crime he did not commit. Hickman's mother...